Paul Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman: A Journey of Unapologetic Joy and Playfulness

Explore the joyful world of Pee-Wee Herman, brought to life by the legendary Paul Reubens. A nostalgic journey of unapologetic playfulness and iconic laughter.

Paul Reubens plays "Pee-Wee Herman" in Tim Burton's iconic 1985 film.

When I was a child, waking up early on Saturdays meant one thing: watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Little did I know that my love for this whimsical character, portrayed by the legendary Paul Reubens, would become a defining aspect of my childhood and leave an everlasting mark on my life.

At first, my parents might have thought my fascination with Pee-Wee was just a typical childhood obsession with colorful and silly television shows. After all, Pee-Wee's Playhouse was a delightful series featuring anthropomorphic household items like talking sofas and a witty globe. What could be more harmless?

However, my family's concerns started when I began to imitate Pee-Wee incessantly. I talked like him, walked like him, and found myself endlessly inspired by his exuberant personality: "La-la-la-la-la."  At times, I even found myself quoting his iconic lines, such as the famous exclamation about not messing with someone's dots. And I would say stuff like, "Knock! Knock! Who's there?" and "I know you are, but what am I?" I had fully embraced Pee-Wee's persona and couldn't help but express it, even in public places like the Piggly-Wiggly during grocery shopping trips.

While my mother, father, and older brother were not entirely pleased (and my younger brother just shrugged his shoulders) with my Pee-Wee imitations outside the comfort of our home, I felt a connection with the character that went beyond surface-level entertainment. Pee-Wee represented something deeper to me - a sense of jouissance, wild abandon, and the desire to be extraordinary and unapologetically unique.

When Pee-Wee's Big Adventure hit the big screens, I was six years old and already in my element, loving to show off and talk endlessly about my favorite things. Interestingly, my other passion at the time was listening to Christian singer Sandy Patti, which might have seemed like an odd combination for a young child. Nevertheless, my love for Pee-Wee and Sandy Patti knew no bounds.

The movie itself was a dream come true. I adored the Rube Goldberg contraption that prepared a simple bowl of cereal and fed the dog in the opening scene. And of course, who could forget Pee-Wee's beloved bike? I yearned for a life like his, filled with color, joy, and a happy home.

Looking back on those memories now, I realize that Pee-Wee was more than just a character to me. He represented a fantasy, a glimpse into an intriguing and liberating life. In my young mind, Pee-Wee embodied the essence of what I thought a happy and carefree life might look like - a single man, riding his bike, surrounded by a vibrant and accepting community. But most importantly, he cherished what mattered most to him - his beloved bike.

As the news of Paul Reubens' passing on July 30th, 2023, reached the world, I couldn't help but feel a profound sense of gratitude for the joy he brought to countless lives, including mine. The iconic laugh that resonated with so many of us will forever remain etched in our hearts.

Pee-Wee's Laugh: Which I Imitated Incessantly Until My Parents Forbade Me to Laugh Like Him. 

So here's to you, Mr. Reubens. Thank you for sharing the gift of Pee-Wee Herman with the world. Your unapologetic embrace of joy and playfulness touched the lives of many, including a little boy who found solace and happiness in your exuberant character. Heh heh heh!

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What If Life Were Like the City Builder Simulation Video Game Cities Skylines?

I don't consider myself a gamer. However, like many kids who grew up in the 1990s, I did have a major hankering for the Nintendo and Super Nintendo. There was one point in my childhood that I almost edged onto sociopathy when I used my best friend at the time just to go to his house to play video games. I think his parents eventually caught on when they realized that Lance had gone out to play and I was left in his bedroom stomping on those pesky Goomba characters that are Mario's constant annoyance.

I stopped playing Mario and advanced onto city builder games.

One game did stick with me after my Nintendo phase wore off (by the time I was in Sixth or Seventh grade). I started to play Sim City and - at some point - I discovered a game that my brother had installed on his computer - A-Train. My interest in city builders was born. It's not a big surprise that I fell into city builder type of games. I had (and still have) a fond affection for Matchbox cars. And I always liked playing around with maps; and, my older brother liked maps too; I think at one point he and I - in one of our rare bonding moments - worked on a super map of an imaginary city in which we pasted a bunch of white-colored posters together with tape and mapped out our city in number two pencil. It was epic. I think we had a city that was composed of at least twelve or thirteen pieces of poster-sized paper.  

La Grange! Oh, how I loved making this city.

I have played all of the Sim City games. But it wasn't until Cities Skylines came out in 2015 that I really saw the potential of a city builder. What a game. What I like the most about City Skylines is that the gameplay is more dynamic than Sim City. First of all, a player has a much larger cityscape to play with, and the city feels integrated even across multiple districts and distances. One train station built in the northwestern part of the map can affect what happens in the city center. 

And I am always amazed by the simulation. There is a cause and effect reality to Cities Skylines - and most city builders - that make it playable. It almost kind of feels like real life. 

A story of my own Cities Skylines City: La Grange

There is one city I built in Cities Skylines that I am proud of and still play it from time to time. It is a coastal city. I called it La Grange. I have a crappy Mac Mini that is not designed for serious gameplay, so I have to play the game at the lowest graphical level - and I usually try to aim for a city that does not have more than 130,000 people. Of course, I use mods. That's probably the second-best part about Cities Skylines (the first best part is naming everything like you are Adam and Eve in the Garden) - you can access a treasure trove of user-created buildings, roads, and tweaks to the vanilla game. I particularly like using the multiple track enabler mod so I can have subway systems with double, triple, and quadruple tracks. The automatic bulldoze mod is a must because who wants to manually raze every abandoned building; the same goes for the automatic emptying mod (although it is just easier to not have cemeteries and landfills in your city).

Look at those cims scurry to catch the bus!

The third thing I like about Cities Skylines is that it is essentially a traffic simulator game. Everything and everyone has to move around your city. Tiny tweaks in the gameplay can drastically change your cims' movement (N.B.,  In Sim City citizens, are called sims, but if you are playing City Skylines they're called cims. Get it?). For example, I recently moved a bus stop at a bustling intersection and all of a sudden there was a sudden, mass movement of people in the game briskly walking to the next stop.

Traffic is a nightmare - I still can't alleviate the congestion at my airport.

It took me a long time to build a good city. The trick is making a decent transit infrastructure to move cims around the city; that includes subway and bus connections, as well as an integrated interstate highway system. The game has a monorail system that is fun to use, but cims do not like to use it. Trams are great as a replacement for buses that use a heavily traveled route. Cable cars, ferries, and hot air balloons are also an option.

Building a city with districts that have enacted policies unique to their district - no heavy traffic or recycling initiatives - can really change the make-up of gameplay as well.


What if life were like a city builder game?

1. Everyone would go to work, go home, and go to ONE park or commercial zone.
2. Your car would disappear into thin air at random times.
3. The bulldozer would be God. Essentially.
4. It would be like that movie The Truman Show. But with more bulldozers and cims.

The game is connected to loads of assets
you can download for free - many of them made by creative modders.

The developers of this game, Colossal Order, keep coming out with new iterations of the game. The newest one is Park Life - which I really like because it allows you to make a more interactive park system in a city. As with most city builder games, zoning is essential. There are residential, commercial, industrial, and office zones. Zones build up around the road network - but as the city grows and the zones max out along the street grid, there are often pockets of green space that now I can populate with micro parks and whatnot. 

It's funny. My post is becoming an advertisement for a video game. Who knew my blog would boast of such things! I want to wrap up by saying the toys and games we played with as kids do somehow find their way into adult life. I don't have posters scribbled in graphite, but I have a saved game that I love to load up every now and again. So, every city tells a story. I don't play this game every day. I play it as a way to zone out and to relax. It is one activity that I can do where I can empty out work-related stress and just focus on planning my little city of La Grange. I think I need to upgrade my Mac - though - if I want to simulate more cims!

Check out the cityscape of La Grange. Can you spot the arcology?

Another view of La Grange with the city sewer system in the foreground.

It's fun to follow individual cims to see where they go.

Become a hero and put out fires that periodically pop up.
This one looks ominous. Like a throwback to the fires that rained down from Mount Vesuvius back in the day.

I'm obsessed with creating zoos and parks.

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Fish in the Sea (Or, Why I Like Aquariums)

Coney Island Beach back in the day.

I enjoy aquariums. The vast amount of water in large, transparent tanks transfix the eyes. I can watch stingrays all day. I anthropomorphize their bellies — don't you think they look like smiling faces? In New York — at Coney Island — there is a modest aquarium. I was excited when I found the moray eel hanging out behind a fake coral. Aquatic creatures! It's comforting to fantasize about life in water. One of my favorite Disney animations is The Sword in the Stone*— the boy Arthur turns into a squiggly little fish — then a squirrel — but it is the fish scene I liked the most. Wouldn't life be so much agiler under the waves? Well, when a garfish isn't chasing you.

Arthur (as a fish) being chased by a garfish 
in Disney's The Sword and the Stone (1963)

Throwback Thursday: Family Vacation Photograph from A July Summer of 1984 Trip to Destin, Florida

My Brother (to the right) and I in Destin, Florida circa July 1984

Somewhere in the 1980s, my parents made me wear floaties as I learned to swim. Read more about it right here, on my writer's blog Stones of Erasmus!

It's funny how memory works. You think you remember it just as it happened. It ain't so. For example, I remember sitting on a hotel bed in Florida eating Pringles with my younger brother - wearing floaties.

That's pretty much how it went down for the "Roselli - July 1984" beach vacation. Except I was eating Planters brand cocktail peanuts - and that's my older brother in the photograph, not my younger sibling. And look. He's attempting to give me bunny ears. I'm clueless.

Mom says we jumped on the bed. But there's no photograph of that.

And no one can confirm it's Destin. But I don't care. I'd like to think that there's a six-year old me floating in some beachside pool in Destin - the State-of-everlasting-beach-vacations, Florida.

And ohhhh. I found the floaties. And look at me chomping on those Sour Cream and Onion Ruffles brand potato chips.

Wear Your Floaties!

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Paul of Tarsus on Childishness

ὅτε ἤμην νήπιος, ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος: ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου. 

When I was a child — I spoke like a child, had feelings like a child, and I had a mind like a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away those childish things.

Paul of Tarsus, First century A.D.
First Letter to the Church in Corinth, Chapter Thirteen, verse Eleven.

Paul of Tarsus as depicted by a statue of him 

in front of the Church of Saint Paul 

Outside the Walls in Rome, Italy.

Paul in this quote from a letter he wrote to the church at Corinth (circa 56 A.D.) assumes childish things are something to move away from, to discard — and secondly, he assumes he has become a man. All grown up. The Greek word for "man" is ἀνήρ which can also be translated as "gentleman". I can imagine Paul wants us to also shed this notion of Christianity as a baby's religion, as something infants do, crying like children to their grown-up silent gods. Paul is a gentleman and assumes his God responds in kind. Paul loved writing letters — and he loved to extoll his own weaknesses as strength. He was a child! He said childish things! Perhaps he pouted when his mother would not take him to bathe in the salty goodness of the sea — or maybe he prattled on like a child in the way children do? But he is a man, now! Paul surely sees children as mewling, puking, and speaking nonsense, having nothing really important to say — as if faith is something only grown-ups do — what children do is make-believe. To have a mind of a child is in Paul's mind to be imperfect — what we mean when we say childish. But Paul informs us that he has become a man — a full-grown person who has evidently discarded such puerile traits such as insouciant idleness and unabashed temper tantrums. I must agree I prefer the mature man to the mewling babe — but I am somewhat suspicious that in a strident act of becoming all childish things are banished.

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Who Are Your Reading Mentors?

Bonnie Bess Wood and Frank Levy, Innovators in Reading

I take it for granted that I am a life-long reader. Yet I must stop and consider the people who inspired me to be a reader for life. Yes, the public library played its part, but also individual persons as well. One was indeed a librarian, but the other was her husband. Here is my story about Frank and Bonnie: 

       I met Bonnie and Frank the Summer I was thirteen years old. Bonnie was the interim library director at the local branch public library near my home. I would spend afternoons at the library as a volunteer page. Bonnie noticed me reading in between the stacks and instead of chastising me for not shelving books, began a relationship of reading with me that has lasted into my adult years. She chose for me to read Chronicles of Narnia, Dante's Inferno, Count of Monte Cristo, and John Steinbeck's Acts of King Arthur when I was reading only Stephen King novels. "If you like bologna, it is good, but it's still bologna," Bonnie told me. "You're only on this earth for a finite amount of time, so you can choose to eat either bologna sandwiches or filet mignon. The choice is yours." I kept on reading Stephen King and John Grishman, but I would also read from the list of Pulitzer Prize novels or National Book Award winners that Bonnie introduced me to as a librarian. Bonnie's rationale reflected a commitment to literature that privileged quality over fluff, but also gave the reader the freedom of choice.
    At the time I met Bonnie and Frank, they were building their nascent Children's Summer Theater company, Stories in Motion and were experimenting with various methods of presenting literature and film as a living narrative. Frank had been hired by the public library as a professional storyteller and lecturer. In one story, Flutterby the Butterfly, Bonnie performed the part of Flutterby, dancing through the audience dressed in a costume she herself had designed and created, while Frank told the story with physical expression and inclusion of the child audience. I played the lepidopterist who is unable to catch Flutterby in his net. Bonnie created costumes and masks which Frank used to bring to life living "stories in motion."
    Reading was promoted for its own sake in the novel presentation of the narrative as a performance for the love of the story. The simple idea was to perform and involve young people in the telling of a story as a way to encourage interest in literature. After a performance of Flutterby, children would approach the librarian for books on butterflies. Or, after a performance at a public school where Frank performed the role of the pianist Chopin in full costume and in character, librarians and teachers could more easily encourage their students to read about Chopin or about classical music. Stories in Motion encouraged reading by performing literature in public places to elicit from the audience a response to read in turn, as a pleasurable aesthetic, and not merely for the satisfaction of a mark or an obligation.
    I think the success of Stories in Motion lies in the collaborative efforts of its creators. As a librarian, Bonnie brings to the project years of experience working in school and university libraries. Also, she is a researcher. She researches possible stories, mines their literary history, and works with Frank to create the story from an existing database of World Literature, whether it be a story about Purim, or background information on Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Frank takes Bonnie's raw research and finds in a story the essential plot points and presents the story theatrically and totally committed to the essence of the literature in its purest form. Like Odysseus telling the story of his ten-year journey home from Troy, Frank marks the importance of literature in its ability to be told.
    Stories in Motion stories are told from the rich treasure trove of out-of-copyright literature, namely the classics, which belong to the common trust. This means, for example, they do not produce the Disney version of Little Mermaid, but Hans Christian Andersen's original. Ariel, not obedient to the rules of the spell that has transformed her into a human, loses her prince and turns into sea foam at the story's fatal end. Children are indoctrinated by Disney's version which casts Ariel as a comic character who wins her prince and lives happily ever after. Stories in Motion takes a risk by telling the original tale; a risk that involves convincing parents and children that Little Mermaid is a tragic tale where all is not resolved nicely in the end. The risk is losing the interest of the children who prefer the Disneyfication of the tale, and may not be willing, at least at first, to be exposed to the original telling. At the end of the day, the risk of upsetting a child who wishes to play the part of Ariel, so she can wed a fictional prince, is overcome by giving this same child access to a piece of literature that is true to its literary history. The child in a Stories in Motion production learns organically that a story can either be tragic or comic, that a story has a narrative history of its own as well as constitutive of a cultural literacy that the child would otherwise be bereft of if she had only been fed the commercialization of literature that privileges what is marketable over a commitment to literature itself, for its own sake.
    The vision of Stories in Motion is creative and opposed to the mainstream commodification of storytelling. The plays are scaled down to the bare essentials of theater aesthetics. A Stories in Motion stage is bare. No unnecessary props or elaborate eye-candy adorn the proscenium, save for a simple background suggestive of the theme. Also, when Frank adapts a classic piece of literature for performance by a group of young people, he scales down the script to preserve the muscle of the story. By re-imaging classic stories, such as Wizard of Oz, the Arthurian legend, Pinocchio, or Wind in the Willows, to name a few recent productions, Stories in Motion remains a completely kid-driven production. A child controls lights, sound, and works backstage. Young people work with choreographers and assist in directing. The cast is composed of 100-150 children. Every actor in the cast has at least one speaking role and very seldom is only one child the star of the show. The muscle of the show is in the purity of the narrative but also the individual actors and stage workers who learn collaborative learning skills in putting a play together in one to three weeks for public performance. The vision of Stories in Motion includes both the preservation of literature and the instilling in young people the necessary life skill of teamwork.
    I had the privilege as a high school drama teacher to produce a Stories in Motion adaptation for myself. With my group of thirty high school students, we produced Sword in the Stone, an adaptation from Sir Thomas Mallory's book Le Morte D'Arthur. Directing a Stories in Motion play gave me the opportunity to produce a novel way to present literature. The metaphor of generativity is not lost on me. Having bestowed on me as a child a love of literature for its own sake, and a commitment to literature in general, it was with pathos that I directed the Stories of Motion adaptation of the Arthurian legend. I took what was given to me as a child by Bonnie and Frank and was able in turn to present it to my own students. By doing Sword in the Stone, I wanted to introduce my students to the Arthurian legend in a way that was theatrical but at the same time expose them to an important cultural and literary tale. At first, my students were not interested in Arthur as a play to perform, but once we read through the Stories in Motion script, I could see that my students saw the play as an opportunity for self-expression. They learned the legend of Arthur intuitively and theatrically, asking me questions about Uther Pendragon and the Mist People, the May Party, Morgan La Fay, and the importance of the sword in the stone as a metaphor for coming-of-age. In the end, through a unique presentation of literature, my students found themselves not only as drama students but purveyors of literature, without recourse to the traditional methods of teaching literature in American high schools.
    It is with this exposition that I recommend Ms. Bonnie Bess Wood and Mr. Frank Levy, co-creators of Stories in Motion, as verifiable innovators in reading. 

Thank you, Bonnie and Frank.

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image credit: storiesinmotion

Are Philosophers Inspired by the Figure of the Child?

In this post, I discuss one of my favorite topics: how have thinkers, writers, and philosophers been inspired by the figure of the child?

I am stuck on this topic of the child as a figure of philosophical thought or inspiration. The question writ large is this: how can the child be both a muse and tabula rasa? In other words, how can the child be a figure of inspiration, yet at the same time, not capable of the label philosopher? The philosopher, artist, thinker, writer, goes to the child for their inspiration, but the paradox is this: the child is seldom seen as a locus of philosophical import. How can it be both? Both muse and empty of content? We call the child innocence but what we mean is empty, according to Kincaid. And i agree. The label of innocence creates a bind. A problem. Innocence maintains the status of muse but creates a problem by which the child is only able to miraculously appear through nostalgia and leaves whence she came. William Blake trumpets the child as a muse. Blake writes of a poet/piper in the introductory verse of the Songs of Innocence who is visited by a child on a cloud who commands him to write: "Piper sit thee down and write / In a book that all may read." Is the child merely an apparition for the romantic poet? Notice it is the poet and not the lofty nude boy cherub who puts words onto paper. How can it be that the child inspires the poet to write but is bereft of his own song?

I can name three famous instances where a child appears in the margins of the history of philosophy. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates employs a slave child to demonstrate to Meno that learning is recollection. Meno assures Socrates that the boy has no previous knowledge of geometry. The question is if the child has no prior knowledge of geometry can she still learn it? Socrates asks the slave boy questions. He does not supply him with answers as if his mind were an empty vessel. Socrates is notorious for asserting that we come upon the quest for knowledge at an instance of nothing. We know nothing. Nothing is a starting point. Just by the guidance of a question, the slave boy is able to come up with the solution to the problem of halving a square. Plato does not indicate the child's age. I would guess he is no older than sixteen. No younger than seven. Is it a coincidence that Socrates uses him as an example? To use a child to illustrate a philosophical point suggests something about the status of a child. In this case a slave child. To be a slave and a child at the time of Socrates was to be afforded little political privilege. Neither the child or the slave were properly thought of as citizens of the state. Philosophy is adult business. Citizen business. So to demonstrate the boy's ability to know, to recollect knowledge, as a priori to learning itself, is to present the child as exemplar, but still leaves us to question the concept of child as philosopher.

Nietzsche famously invokes the figure child in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in tandem with the lion and the camel, as the third stage in the metamorphosis of philosophical progress.

Augustine in the Confessions opens a random selection of sacred scripture whereby he is inspired by Saint Paul’s words to put on the person of Christ and rid himself of wanton desires. When the child enters the scene of philosophical history she becomes an example, as we can see in Socrates’s use of the boy, or as metaphor for something “new” and “fresh” as in Nietzsche. Or simply inspiration as in Augustine’s anecdotal story of his conversion.

For the most part children are excluded from the annals of Western Philosophy in the main along with discussions of sex, the body, and anything related to our finitude. Philosophers in the main have traditionally been more fond of loftier topics such as mind, reason, and clear and distinct ideas. Children are far from such sophisticated concepts being as they are undeveloped intellectually. While we can grant the child her own special status as philosopher — who has not heard a child ask why? — it is still fairly common to assume philosophy is meant for grown-ups. The long-standing view of children is that they are extensions of adults. Thomas Hobbes excludes the child as having the status of person in the Leviathan. Along with madmen and fools, the child is a brute beast, with no claim to the law or sovereignty. For Hobbes, the child is not a person. According to Phillip Aries, the concept of the child as independent from an adult only recently became adopted in the West in the nineteenth century. For centuries children were seen as diminutive versions of adults. Homunculi. The great modern revelation, it is said, is that children embody a consciousness that is temporally defined and authentic to childhood itself. How far have we come from Hobbes? But how uneasy it is for us to ask the child muse to speak her own voice. Children grow up. They become adults. And it is usually adults who provide the child's voice. The word "infant" means "without voice." The Romantic view of childhood, as seen in the Blake poems, and also with Rousseau, privileged the child as possessing a unique access to experience that becomes lost after the emergence of puberty. What Freud would later call the stage of latency, the period after infancy leading up to adolescence, becomes a period in the development of the human person infused with a new sense of interest and curiosity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau breaks the silence and places the figure of the child front and center, but he too retains a nostalgia for something lost. We vacillate, I conjecture, from positing the child as an empty slate to embodying all truths, but in each event, we are foreclosed to the child qua child.

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A Gloss on the Child and Wonder

 "Blue Boy" Thomas Gainsborough 

Warning: This is merely a gloss and not a full argument. I am trying to think of the implications of the following issues for a larger paper on the topic of wonder: In 18^th century British genre painting, the novel and lyrical poetry gives rise to the notion of the child as a category of spontaneity and innocence. Blake, exalts the child in his Songs of Innocence and describes experience as a rite of passage in the Songs of Experience. Art in this period glorified the child as well, like Gainsborough’s the Blue Boy. The child as imaginative exuberance fits nicely into the Romantic project for what poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to do was to break away from the stodgy hierarchies of Classicism to create a new kind of poetry that favored immediate experience and truth-seeking through the natural, everyday things of life. Coleridge sought to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, creating nostalgic lyrics that suggest tales of a Mediaeval source but are actually products of a childhood imagination. Romanticism, according to critics like Philip Aries and James Kincaid, created a rift between adult and child as two separate entities. Kincaid writes in his book Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, “However much of childhood radiance is lost by the adult and however difficult the connections may be to recover, Wordsworth and Coleridge are not talking about two species staring at each other across the chasm of puberty but about a form of imaginative and spiritual continuity” (63). For Coleridge the child and his own childhood is a spring of “imagination and spiritual continuity”.  There is this idea of the child who is not marred by Blakean experience, untrammeled by the vicissitudes of life, is the engine of art.
I wonder though if we have misinterpreted the project of Romanticism proper. It is not that the child, as such, is the inspiration for art, but that art is born from the child. To be an artist one must be like a child in only one way: to wonder. Bridging the gap of experience, the only thing the artist takes with him from childhood, is wonder, but transmuted -- not the wonder of being in its fullness, which puberty finds it to be a sham -- but the wonder of being in its limits. For isn't the project of adulthood the wonder of being a philosopher? The fear of death no longer is the fear that there is no God, the fear of the child, but rather, that in death, we will no longer be able to philosophize.
Feel free to share your own ideas, below:

Childhood Memory: When I Got My First Bicycle

In this post, I recount my memory of my first bike using a prose style of poem-writing.

My Schwinn was bright green, with a streak of black across its aluminum frame; it had five speeds that I could control from the handlebars, and an orange reflector on the back, a pedal-operated light on the handrest that would glow with fierce intensity through the night.

"Bike Agrowing"

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